why I dont like Descartes

Question

I know he's probably one of the most well known pholosophers but WHY did he have to question EVERYTHING?????? I don't like his theories, especially dualism which still impacts our school systems today.

Here's how:

dualism is the theory/believing that mind and body are seperated; they're not one. This leaves Descartes to prioritize the mind, since the only thing he's sure of, is him thinking. ("I think therefore I am") Now, if you live where I live you know our classes are seperated based on your learning skills. the better you score in sience and languages, the higher you go. this affects your ability to go to university or college. But they measure it with how you remember stuff, working with your mind, not your body. Classes where you work with your hands or body (sports) are seen as lower and will often leave you with lower income jobs. (not always) It seems to be more important to remember and to be able to tell people everything you know in a rush than to be able to sovle problems and create solutions with other objects and your hands, while we all know that to build a hous, you need more builders than architects right? When you grow up, you don't actually need all the things that you've learned in school, so why tell kids they have to be in lower classes, when they would be able to fuction a whole lot of other jobs?

I also can't stand nor understand why he wants to say that we have to be unsure of exact sience when we really made that up, so we cannot actually be wrong about it? (example: if you take one stone and add another, you have two. No matter how you say he word "two", it stays 2 and you can't change that right?) plus language, isn't that something to be sure of? even if we live in a dream? and wouldn't your dream be the real world if you've been here for this long? Why can't a simulation be real? Who defines real at this point?

I think he had a huge Godcomplex, but thats okay, he gave me something to complain and think about.

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It's been a while since I read the works of Descartes, so pardon me if I get some details wrong.

Your consternation with Descartes is understandable and justified. Although he may inaguarated the birth of modern philosophy, he brought with it problems and biases that philosophers that followed him are still grappling with. For instance, his privileging of mind over body, as you said. Even if this conclusion was arrived at from his method of radical doubt, this doesn't change the fact that this privileging is a remnant of the Scholastics (which, by here, I mean the mode of philosophy subordinated to theology) that he tried so hard to escape. Alongside his efforts to re-enter the figure of God in philosophy, Descartes never truly escaped the shadow of Scholasticism.

There are still benefits from his philosophy, though. For one, his method of radical doubt was truly revolutionary, in all senses of that word. That method was wholly different from the methods that were deployed by other philosophers who came before him. Even though it was misused at first, it will come to later influence the idealist dialectics of Hegel (and, by proxy, the materialist dialectics of Marx) and the phenomenological method of Husserl and his students.

The general import of Descartes' method is that you should never take things for granted, and that you should examine your knowledge of things so that it doesn't distort your perception of the true nature of the things you interact with in your everyday life.

You've connected your gripes with Descartes with the material circumstances through which you interpreted him. This gives me license to make a few materialist comments regarding the nature of Descartes' philosophical enterprise. You see, the background of Cartesian philosophy was the emergence of capitalism and the division of labor that came along with it. To make the production of commodities more efficient, the separation of manual and intellectual labors was implemented. This set of material circumstances, I think, bore a huge shadowy influence on the premises Descartes used for his philosophy. (Sohn-Rethel discusses this general topic a bit more in his books.)

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Descartes might consider us to be made of only thinking substance if neurons count since those more or less permeate our body, which are an essential part of our Mind.

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why I dont like Descartes

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